And leave the wife and children behind?
‘The law doesn’t look on that,’ says Jack. ‘That time they would say the wife must go to Transkei.’
I am amazed at his apparent loyalty to his then employer, the apartheid government, and his almost blind acceptance of its laws. But he admits that it simply wasn’t his place to say anything.
‘I was an inspector,’ he says. ‘They wouldn’t worry about me.’
It’s an attitude I’ve heard from other black people and white people too, my parents included. That, back then, you didn’t disagree with the government; you just accepted that things were the way they were, you did your job and you kept quiet. Those who didn’t were marked out either as activists or sympathisers, both of which could land you in trouble.
Throughout our conversation, Jack insists that he was helping people – and that the people were grateful for what he was doing. The outsiders were coming and taking the locals’ jobs and women, he says. The locals wanted them out.
I ask him how the people reacted when he caught them.
‘They would fight,’ he says. ‘It was dangerous.’
That’s why he carried a gun.
‘Because it’s dangerous,’ he says again. ‘They can kill you.’
Sometimes, Jack says, he had to run. Other times he would get the police to go back with him. But he never had to use the gun, and no one ever as much as pointed a gun at him. Knives, yes, ‘to try to open the road and run,’ he says. ‘But if they see you’ve got a gun, nobody will bother you.’
He pauses for a long time. He’s not laughing now.
‘It was…’ he stops again.
‘Yoh, it was very hard. Because it’s my job. If I couldn’t do that, then I would be fired.’
He says people threatened to kill him sometimes, saying it wasn’t right, the job he was doing.
‘And I would say to them, “Give me a better job, and I will do that.”’
I’ve heard that Jack’s house was burned down twice but he insists it only happened once, much later, in 1993 when there was widespread unrest following the assassination of the ANC’s Chris Hani. It was the year before South Africa’s first democratic election.
At that time, he says, anyone who lived in the township and worked for the government was a target.
Jack was already working for the Department of Labour then, but admits that there might have been people who’d held a grudge about his work for the Bantu Administration in the past.
After his house was burned down, Jack moved to Hornlee, where he still lives today.
When I ask him what the most difficult part of his old job was, he says it was sending the people back to where they came from.
‘Why was that difficult?’ I ask.
‘Because you’ve got a heart, don’t you?’ says Jack. ‘You’re still a human being.’
I know the shop that Piet van Eeden manages; it’s where my father buys his newspaper. I offer to go and buy it for him so I have an excuse to speak to Oom Piet.
In the same way that Vivien Paremoer has always been Tannie to me, Piet has always been Oom.
I find Oom Piet at his manager’s station near the tills and he recognises me right away. There’s the usual chit-chat of what I’m doing now, where his daughters are in the world, how my brothers are doing and who in the family has had babies. But when I mention the book, his attitude changes. He doesn’t seem happy talking about the past.
‘I’ve talked to a lot of people for a lot of books and articles,’ he says. ‘The last time I did that, I said “never again.”’
I ask him what kinds of books and articles those were.
‘I can’t talk about it now,’ he says, looking pointedly at the cashiers behind the tills. They’re all black.
He seems wary of talking about it at all.
‘It’s behind me,’ he says. ‘That whole system. I’ve left it behind.’
Just when I think he’s blown me off, he carries on: ‘But only because it’s you, and because I know you,’ he says, ‘I’ll talk to you a little.’
He says he’ll come over to my parents’ house the next day.
After his initial apprehension, Oom Piet seems relaxed and happy to talk to me in my parents’ house.
Oom Piet’s take on the role of the Bantu Administration is very different from Jack’s. Whereas Jack focused very much on the social aspect of reuniting wives in the Transkei homeland with their straying husbands, Oom Piet saw the role as a more practical one.
‘We had to make sure the economy kept going by supplying workers, and seeing that it was done on a proper, coordinated basis,’ he says. ‘Otherwise, if you had to just throw open the doors, you can imagine what kind of influx it would have caused.’
And, he says, you couldn’t allow those people to come in without providing the necessary services for them. But, in a catch-22 situation, you couldn’t budget properly for those services when the censuses weren’t giving a true reflection of the size of the population. And the people who were in Knysna illegally avoided getting polled in an effort not to get caught.
‘You do a census,’ he says, ‘and the census says there are a thousand people. But in reality there are two thousand. Now you work according to the numbers and build a school. Then they say the school is too small. It’s always too small.’
He tells me it was impossible to keep everyone happy.
‘Say I let people come in,’ says Oom Piet. ‘Then they’ll probably come to me later and say we now need church premises. Then I say OK, fine, we’ll make a plan. Now you give them premises for a church. And tomorrow they come and say but that’s an Anglican Church. Now we need this church and another church and another church. If you make one concession, you really need to do your homework. And that’s where things got messy.’
There was never enough money, he says. Funds from the provincial government were extremely limited, and because of Knysna’s hilly terrain, any building work and infrastructure cost considerably more than in most other places in the region.
On the positive side, he says he feels like he meant something to the people.
‘You were at once a teacher, a social worker, a magistrate. You solved problems, you served people with knowledge.’
But he realises those people might not have liked everything he did. As well as controlling the influx of black people into the area, the Bantu Administration was responsible for removing squatters from white-owned land – two jobs that couldn’t have made him popular with the black community.
‘It’s like traffic police,’ he says. ‘We all agree there have to be traffic police on the roads. But they have to catch other people, not you. And that’s how it is. As long as the traffic cop catches other people, it’s hunky-dory. And who likes the traffic cop? We’re all friendly when we see him. But when he walks away, we say, “That’s the last job I’d want.”’
Owéna and Theron saw the shacks appearing on the hills around Knysna; small structures made from corrugated iron, sheet metal and bits of timber. Doors were hardboard or rough planks. Some shacks had glass windows, found